Materials Culture of Chemistry

The Culture of Chemistry materials (24) were designed to be context-rich as well as active, current, connected and easy to use. The materials are not meant to teach library skills , nor are they intended to replace a textbook. They are keyed to fundamental concepts, not adding new topics, but teaching the basics with fresh and modem examples. Each piece stands alone and focuses on a paper from the primary literature. The first set of 6 field-tested modules is ... 

Table III. Examples of Problems from Culture of Chemistry Materials...

What is needed is something between a Baedeker and a Rosetta stone, something that introduces one to the two (or is it more ) cultures of chemistry and physics. As they approach an understanding of what electrons are up to in their shared ground of materials science. This book, a description of modern computational approaches to the solid state, provides the passport of a common language for creative excursions in this fertile middle ground. 

After a chance meeting in Tokyo in 1976 with Alan MacDiarmid, then working in the Department of Chemistry at the University of Pennsylvania, Shirakawa left TIT for a three-year residency with MacDiarmid at Pennsylvania. In 1979, he returned to Japan, where he assumed the post of associate professor in the Institute of Materials Science at the University of Tsukuba. Three years later he was promoted to full professor, a post he held until his retirement in March 2000. Only seven months later, he was chosen one of the three winners (along with MacDiarmid and Alan Heeger of the University of California at Santa Barbara) of the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry for their discovery of conductive polymers. In addition to the Nobel Prize, Shirakawa has been honored with the 1983 award of the Society of Polymer Science of Japan and the Japanese government s Order of Culture in 2000. 

If chemistry as a material culture continued to evolve gradually over time, chemistry as a discursive system of knowledge experienced a distinct cultural moment that transformed it from an apothecaries art into a public science during the second half of the eighteenth century. The popularity of Rouelle s lectures and Macquer s textbooks attests to the existence of a broader public for chemistry—a public that clamored for a rational representation of chemical art. Many factors contributed to shaping this memorable moment in the evolution of chemistry. The establishment of chemistry in the medical curriculum and the emergent public sphere of the Enlightenment provided a positive profile for... 

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